Tag Archives: Greek crisis

No, this is not a joke. This is the front page of a national daily newspaper from Greece. You can read some more about Eleftheri Ora here: Why is such a newspaper allowed to exist?. In the meantime, here’s the translation of the title:

The Jihadis are spreading the news: the one-eyed Antichrist of Islam is here.

In 2010 Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff drew a cartoon about Loukanikos, the Greek riot dog whose fame was about to take off.

Last week it was made known that the cute street dog had passed away. The news flooded the Greek social media with sadness and even newspapers like The Guardian hosted a canine obituary. Carlos Latuff drew one more cartoon about Loukanikos.

Like this:

Two opinion polls were published yesterday (one by Public Issue and one by Pulse). Both had two notable changes.

1. SYRIZA was around 1% ahead of New Democracy

2. Golden Dawn was the other party with an increase, it scored some 13%-13,5% (NB it got 7 % in the 2012 elections)

The neo Nazi party is now stabilised in the third position and many people wonder… What the fuck?

I was speaking with a foreign correspondent here in Athens about these polls and she was telling me that most polling companies (which are not the most trustworthy institutions in this country) tend to play down the actual ratings of Golden Dawn in order to avoid the furore. She also told me that the actual ratings of Golden Dawn were rather closer to 16%. But still, one could say, they are too small and no one would cooperate with them in government.

No one? Well, just the other day, Babis Papadimitriou, a presenter of SKAI TV and a longtime supporter of all austerity measures since the beginning of the Greek economic crisis (with whatever this may mean about his political affiliation), threw the idea. “If SYRIZA can discuss the possibility of a coalition with the Communist Party, why couldn’t New Democracy discuss the possibility of a Conservative cooperation with a more serious (sic) Golden Dawn?”

I am not sure what exactly he meant by “more serious” but it seems that he at least recognises the fact the neo nazi party has had a pretty indecent behaviour so far, linked to all sorts of abuses, racist violence, populist rhetoric and foul language inside the parliament. He indeed admitted it in a later TV show. But can they become serious, Mpampis? Are you serious?

In any case, speaking of seriousness, there has been a more serious aspect in the afore mentioned opinion polls that few media have highlighted, or even discussed. It’s the qualitative analysis of the party ratings in specific age groups. According to the Pulse poll, Golden Dawn was the second party in the age groups of 18-29 and of 30-44. It makes you think that Greece is lucky to have an ageing population with more old people than young ones, that births have dropped by 10% this year according to some reports yesterday, that younger people are less inclined to be bothered to vote and that older people still tend to vote the same party that once hired them or gave them a good pension. All these, otherwise negative characteristics, are saving this country from becoming officially fascist.

I got a very dark feeling in my guts when I saw this table. Check for yourself and tell me how you feel.

At the beginning, the Greek crisis was interesting just for foreign correspondents, economists and political analysts. After the first year of the crisis, I started observing an increasing interest by scholars and post-grad students who would come to Athens for a week and try to speak with as many people involved & influenced as possible.

Activists followed suit. Last February I met a 20-year old anarchist from US who came to Athens and got in touch with local comrades in an attempt to carry ideas back to the Occupy Wall Street movement. In December 2012, while working with a Norwegian team of journalists, we mingled with a rioting in the anarchist Exarchia district of Athens and witnessed tens of “riot tourists”. Some were here indeed out of sincere solidarity, consciously supporting the struggling Greeks but some were obviously kids on a European city escape who, rather than throwing a coin in Rome’s Fontana di Trevi, chose to throw a stone to a Greek policeman. Don’t ask me if they made a wish in advance.

In February 2012, a close relative who is now working in Middle East told me of a Ukrainian guy who visited Athens ahead of a general strike. His aim was to witness the foreseeable riots that usually accompany our strike demos. Right then I started to feel that Athens is slowly becoming a sort of a spectacle in the same way tourists visit Chernobyl for photo opportunities with radioactive plastic dolls, blood-thirsty Italians visited Bosnian trenches during the Yugoslav war or like Toshifumi Fujimoto, a Japanese truck driver who enjoys visiting war zones instead of dreamy beaches.

Tourism in Bosnia kept dealing with the war. Even now, almost 20 years after, one of the major sight-seeings of the capital Sarajevo is the so called War Tunnel. A quick google search will give you several companies organizing walking tours about the civil war there. Funky Tours, to name but one, is organizing the Sarajevo Total Siege Tour.

Soon humanity coined a neologism for this kind of tourism. You can look it up under the self-explicit War Tourism or even Dark Tourism, which involves travel to sites associated with death and tragedy. There is also the synonymous, but less popular in use, Thanatourism, which derives from the Ancient Greek word Thanatos.

Winged youth with a sword, probably Thanatos, personification of death. Detail of a sculptured marble column drum from the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos, ca. 325-300 BC.

Having all these in my mind I knew something like this was coming. Especially after last summer, when I came across the website of Political Tours, a London-based travel agency founded by former New York Times Balkans Correspondent Nicholas Wood. The travel agency’s motto was “Intelligent Travel for Inquiring Minds” and I read that they were organizing tours in North Korea, Libya, Turkey as well as a trip to the US during their elections. So guess what was their latest tour? “Greece and the Euro”, a 8-day phantasmagoria of Greek crisis, misery, unemployment, destruction and poverty. Among speeches with political analysts and journalists, their detailed programme included a “visit to Sydagma Square, where the demonstrations protesting austerity measures have culminated and where many riots have started. We see the damage done by the unrest and then move on to Ermou Street, a place were it was once impossible to find a shop to rent. Now many are empty and pawn shops are prevalent“.

Today I have found a second foreign travel company organizing such a tour. It’s Context. I copy from their website: Context is a network of scholars and specialists—in disciplines including archaeology, art history, cuisine, urban planning, history, environmental science, and classics—who, in addition to our normal work as professors and researchers, design and lead in-depth walking seminars for small groups of intellectually curious travellers. Their new Athens tour, titled Greek Crisis in Context is basically a walk in downtown Athens that ends up in a taverna where the intellectual tourists will fight their thirst with a sip of some Greek wine. This excerpt is from the tour’s description:

Depending on time and how our conversation unfolds we may end the walk in a local wine bar where we can conclude our discussion with the possible solutions and precautions for a brighter future in Greece. As we take a sip from the local Greek wine (not retsina), we will emerge with a much clearer understanding of the Greek economic crisis and its social elements.

The prices for the walking tours are 70 euros per person but there is a possibility to book a private tour for 300 euros.

Which, coincidentally, is a bit less than the much-talked new minimum monthly wage in this country.

I’ve finally finished the production of a short-doc that occupied most of my free time the past 3-4 months. It’s a documentary about the political graffiti in crisis-stricken Athens. The project is the child of an idea I had last January. I was always bumping into amazing works of art in the streets of Athens but these were increasingly politicized, a natural result that was mirroring the social dissatisfaction.

By WD

However, when I would see the same works of art destroyed, painted over or, simply, damaged by time, I thought I should document them. Thus, I like to see this documentary rather like an instant photo of Athens today. A photo in which one can see the urban art, the discontent, the politics, the dissent and, more discreetly than the rest, the pessimism.

By Absent

The documentary focuses on four Greek political street artists. Paul, MaPet, Absent and Bleeps. I contacted them last August and told them about the project. I’ve explained its aim to them, spent many hours discussing details but also gaining their trust. We started filming in September and finished at the end of October. I specifically asked them not to feel pressed to do something but to simply call me when they have inspiration for a new work.

“The real terrorism is the 8 o’clock news” – by Paul

A lot of people thing that graffiti artists simply get a bunch of coloured sprays and paint whatever they want, just like that. While many might as well do that, the above mentioned four artists usually do some sort of preparations that can take from 1 hour to 1 week, if not even more. In addition, in Greece we tend to think that these people belong to some far left fractions, that they are vandals in the same uncritical way that our society equates vandals, rioters and anarchists. Well, they are not. They are normal people, with normal professions, having normal lives. They do not belong to the same party, group or organization; they don’t necessarily know each other either. In fact, they come from very diffrerent backgrounds. But the have one common thing which helped me give a title to the documentary in a way that it includes all of them.

“Wake Up!” by Bleeps (Photo by G. Nikolakopoulos)

They try to pass a message to the rest of the society. A wake up call.

Here is the short-documentary. I hope you enjoy it.

You can find out more about the short-doc, watch the trailer and check extended galleries on the artists’ works, here: thewakeupcall.gr

At last, my personal project which occupied most of my free time in the past 2-3 months is nearing its end. It’s a short-documentary on the political graffiti in Athens during the Greek crisis, an idea that originally came from this very blog.

This is the trailer of the documentary, I hope you like it and share it around.